Microsoft Teams Jumps to 20M Active Users
I wasn’t looking for exciting, dramatic news in yesterday’s blog post from CVP for Microsoft 365 Jared Sparato. It’s entitled “5 attributes of successful teams.” May I beg forgiveness for expecting something entirely touchy-feely, cheerfully and respectfully adapted from Stephen Covey? Indeed, there was plenty of such material therein, eminently worth reading. But the news that Microsoft Teams jumps to 20M active users is what really caught my eye. Here’s that paragraph from the post, verbatim:
In fact, today Teams has more than 20 million daily active users. What’s more, while these users start with simple text-based chat, they quickly move on to richer forms of communication and collaboration. For instance, last month Teams customers participated in more than 27 million voice or video meetings and performed over 220 million open, edit, or download actions on files stored in Teams.
That’s a lotta active users, and a lotta user actions, too. Paul Thurrott reports in a follow-up piece that this number is up from 13 million in July. This represents a staggering 35% growth rate in 5 months (which extrapolates to 84% growth annually). He also asserts that “…now there is no doubt: Microsoft Teams is well ahead of Slack and is growing far more rapidly.” Slack, however, has remonstrated to the point where Thurrott today published an item “Slack Claims Higher Engagement than MS Teams.” Ultimately it’s a numbers game and both sides can still claim to be ahead. But that’s not why I wrote this post . . .
This cool graphic adorns Sparato’s blog post. The video shows its visual items stand for elements in “the art of teamwork.”
[Click image for full-sized view.]
When Microsoft Teams Jumps to 20M Active Users, I See Market Vindication
My friend and colleage, @KariTheFinn, use Microsoft Teams daily. This goes back to when we started work on our joint site in July 2017. We’re on Teams 7 days a week most weeks, to interact with each other. Our shared website Win10.Guru, is the result of hundreds of hours of interaction, research, collaboration and discussion. We use it many times daily for chat items and file exchanges. When Kari writes something he sends me a chat message. It tells me to don my Editor-in-Chief hat and copy edit one of his posts or articles.
We also use Teams for voice. Occasional calls let us discuss budgeting, forward planning, and topic assignments. They’re handy to resolve matters when we fail to see eye-to-eye on certain topics. We’ve even held on-line by-invitation meetings with up to 30-40 attendees to deliver webinars on topics and tutorials that are also featured on the site.
In short, Teams works for us as an excellent and powerful collaboration tool. It’s part of a Microsoft Office subscription. It’s now being integrated into Windows 10. There’s a web page from MS entitled “Get Microsoft Teams for free” that explains how to take advantage of its basic capabilities at no cost. It also includes a section that explains how much it costs to subscribe to Office 365 Business Essentials or Premium versions, and what extra capabilities in Teams that confers on subscribers. From my own personal experience, I can say from extended experience that Teams is easy to learn, fun to use, and boosts productivity enormously. Kari and I both believe we couldn’t do Win10.Guru nearly as well without Teams in the picture. Check it out!